Hawaii makes electric car part of green power initiative

GM and its Volt electric vehicle may be in trouble, but another effort to …

With General Motors having supposedly bet its future on the development of the Volt electric vehicle, the company's dire economic straits raise questions regarding whether the car will ever come to market. But GM isn't the only electric game in town; a startup called Better Place is taking a radically different approach to the electric vehicle problem, and the company is cutting partnerships with a number of governments in its efforts to put the infrastructure it needs in place. The latest state to announce a partnership is Hawaii, where the program would fit nicely into a general renewable energy push.

The Volt program essentially follows the standard car model: it will be sold to consumers that are then responsible for making sure it runs. The battery is fixed, but the car's backup gasoline engine ensures that, even when charging isn't available, the car doesn't become an oversized brick. Otherwise, drivers will be responsible for charging it. Any additional infrastructure that makes charging easier or integrates the battery storage with a smarter grid will be someone else's problem, although GM will work with the electric utilities to smooth this out.

Better Place is taking a radically different approach. The cars will cost relatively little; drivers will pay primarily for access to a network of charging stations and battery exchange sites. The initial plan is to use a car developed jointly by Nissan and Renault that has a 100-mile range per charge, but the program appears to be largely car-agnostic, provided the car's batteries can be swapped out as needed. Better Place plans on thoroughly integrating with the grid to charge during low-use hours and help smooth out interruptions in renewable power by releasing power back from both the batteries stored in charging stations and those in the vehicles themselves.

Obviously, this sort of program requires a lot of coordination, from the installation of charging stations in public parking areas to the integration of battery exchange locations with the grid. As such, Better Place has been lining up agreements with governments that are interested in rolling out the program. These vary from entire nations, such as Denmark and Israel, to regional governments such as a coalition of cities in the Bay Area of California. It has even lined up backing in Australia, where the 100-mile radius of the car would seem to be more of a liability.

On Tuesday, the company announced its latest agreement, one that appears to make a tremendous amount of sense: Hawaii. All of the fossil fuels used in the state have to be imported, which makes the market very price-sensitive. The physical constraints of the islands themselves are such that each individual island fits comfortably within a 100-mile radius that represents the car's range, as shown above.

But Hawaii makes a great fit for the program in ways that go well beyond the geographical. Generating electric power from fossil fuels also gets expensive in the state, which happens to have significant renewable power potential in the form of wind, wave/tidal, solar, and geothermal resources. Earlier this year, the state announced an ambitious program that would see it obtain 70 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2030. That should ensure that these cars use less carbon-emitting fuel, even indirectly. This plan also makes the battery capacity that the Better Place program provides very appealing to the Hawaiian government, since it will require less planning to smooth out the cyclical nature of renewable power sources.

Aside from questions about the business model in general—is the public ready for a radical reinvention of the concept of auto ownership?—the most problematic aspect of this announcement (as with the earlier one in California) is the complete absence of details on exactly what the governments are signing up for. Better Place is a public company, and doesn't appear to be looking to get money from the states. The company did sign an agreement with the local power utility, but the details of that pact weren't revealed. Meanwhile, any messy public issues, such as the use of eminent domain to get charging stations and battery exchanges in place, are put off to the indefinite future.

For now, however, Hawaii appears to be taking few risks by promoting a program that appears to be an excellent fit for its driving and power markets. By the time the state reaches its 70 percent renewable power goal, some form of electric vehicle should be on the market; there's no reason that the state shouldn't try to ensure that the one that does integrates well with the larger grid.